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Building designers typically develop a set of drawings and specifications that graphically and textually depict the building. These documents contain implicit information about the rationale or reasoning leading to the final form of the design. Access to design rationale information avoids the need to speculate about or request for the implicit information stored in the design drawings and specifications. The main focus of this article is on the use of a parameter dependency network to represent design rationale. This paper details one possible data structure capable of generating a parameter dependency network. The parameter dependency network shows how one particular design decision affects other decisions that further affect other decisions. The structured nature of this network allows a computer program to act as a data verification assistant to the human designer. This article also outlines a classification scheme for design rationale systems. Finally, this paper summarizes the contributions of this research and concludes with descriptions of possible future research work.

This paper focuses on applying that part of the design-process knowledge referred to as 'design intent,' which is of essence to material selection and substitution. We have focused on the type of design intent that is related to architectural design. We express design intent in terms of function, user requirements, performance, and physical properties of a design description. This paper shows how design intent can guide the contractor's material selection and substitution when faced with a proprietary brand-name-or-equal specification. In such cases, the designer requires the contractor to use a specified material brand or any other material that is 'equal.' However, the conditions of 'equal' are usually not explicit. Five algorithms structured in pseudocode terms are provided for such equality interpretation. The paper concludes that a better understanding of design-process knowledge can strengthen the communication between design and construction.